"Saturday. Dear Richard has been here a day or two, and his common sense and homely affection are grateful after these fine people with whom I live at sword's points, though for the present turned downwards. It is well to 'thee' and 'thou' it after talking with angels and geniuses. Richard and I spent the afternoon at Walden and got a great bunch of flowers. A fine thunder-shower gloomed gradually up and turned the lake inky black, but no rain came till sunset.
"Sunday. A heavy rain. I must stay at home. I feel sad. Mrs. Ripley was here, but I only saw her a while in the afternoon and spent the day in my room. Sunday I do not give to my duty writing, no indeed. I finished yesterday,[104] after a rest, the article on ballads. Though a patchwork thing, it has craved time to do it."
We come now to the period of the famous conversations in which, more fully than in aught else, Margaret may be said to have delivered her message to the women of her time. The novelty of such a departure in the Boston of forty years ago may be imagined, and also the division of opinion concerning it in those social circles which consider themselves as charged with the guardianship of the taste of the community.
Margaret's attitude in view of this undertaking appears to have been a modest and sensible one. She found herself, in the first place, under the necessity of earning money for her own support and in aid of her family. Her greatest gift, as she well knew, was in conversation. Her rare eloquence did not much avail her at her desk, and though all that she wrote had the value of thought and of study, it was in living speech alone that her genius made itself entirely felt and appreciated. What more natural than that she should have proposed to make this rare gift available for herself and others? The reasons which she herself gives for undertaking the experiment are so solid and sufficient as to make us blush retrospectively for the merriment in which the thoughtless world sometimes indulged concerning[105] her. Her wish was "to pass in review the departments of thought and knowledge, and endeavor to place them in due relation to one another in our minds; to systematize thought, and give a precision and clearness in which our sex are so deficient, chiefly, I think, because they have so few inducements to test and classify what they receive." In fine, she hoped to be able to throw some light upon the momentous questions, "What were we born to do, and how shall we do it?"
In looking forward to this effort, she saw one possible obstacle in "that sort of vanity which wears the garb of modesty," and which, she thinks, may make some women fear "to lay aside the shelter of vague generalities, the art of coterie criticism," and the "delicate disdains of good society," even to obtain a nearer view of truth itself. "Yet," she says, "as without such generous courage nothing of value can be learned or done, I hope to see many capable of it."
The twofold impression which Margaret made is to be remarked in this matter of the conversations, as elsewhere. Without the fold of her admirers stood carping, unkind critics; within were enthusiastic and grateful friends.
The first meeting of Margaret's Conversation Class was held at Miss Peabody's rooms, in West Street, Boston, on the 6th of November, 1839.[106] Twenty-five ladies were present, who showed themselves to be of the elect by their own election of a noble aim. These were all ladies of superior position, gathered by a common interest from very various belongings of creed and persuasion. At this, their first coming together, Margaret prefaced her programme by some remarks on the deficiencies in the education given to women, defects which she thought that later study, aided by the stimulus of mutual endeavor and interchange of thought, might do much to remedy. Her opening remarks are as instructive to-day as they were when she uttered them:—
"Women are now taught, at school, all that men are. They run over, superficially, even more studies, without being really taught anything. But with this difference: men are called on, from a very early period, to reproduce all that they learn. Their college exercises, their political duties, their professional studies, the first actions of life in any direction, call on them to put to use what they have learned. But women learn without any attempt to reproduce. Their only reproduction is for purposes of display. It is to supply this defect that these conversations have been planned."
Margaret had chosen the Greek Mythology for the subject of her first conversations. Her reasons for this selection are worth remembering:—[107]
"It is quite separated from all exciting local subjects. It is serious without being solemn, and without excluding any mode of intellectual action; it is playful as well as deep. It is sufficiently wide, for it is a complete expression of the cultivation of a nation. It is also generally known, and associated with all our ideas of the arts."